Saturday, June 1, 2013

New Crap: Night of the Living Dead- Resurrection

When even your subtitle sounds lame and uninspired, your film is not good. Today's film is Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection, yet another Remake of Romero's seminal Zombie film. There's only, what, 312 of those- not counting Night of the Living Bread. This one comes to us from James Plumb, a name that you may not know yet, but may grow to hate. I know nothing about him personally, but his next film is a Remake of Silent Night, Bloody Night- why? Another thing to note is that this film has practically no budget- around $20,000. As I've said before, that doesn't mean that your film is inherently bad. There are many good films with low budgets. The problem is that working with almost no money is a lot harder, forcing filmmakers to think on their feet and do things differently. A lot of times, however, they just make standard, generic films with just less money/production values behind it. Yes, I am talking about you, Butchered. So today's film is *sort of* a Remake of Romero's film. It keeps many of the same ideas, while setting it in the Present Day (although its rustic setting negates most of that) and in the U.K. There are a lot of problems here, but I'm not just here to complain. I'm MOSTLY here to do that, but that's just because of the film I've got. To see why I'm not racking my brains over this one, read on...

In place of the famous opening with Bar-ba-ra and her brother in the Cemetery, we get some blokes making a guy buy them some British Red Bull substitute. Joy.

Kudos to you for this pointless upside-down shot. It's just so that you don't see the Zombie behind him. In other words, you're cheating.

You can't Remake Night of the Living Dead without a proper Ben. Well, unless you're Jeff Broadstreet.

I'm not going to call him racist, but he did write out the famously-black Character from his films...

The film's focus, however, is on a small family living out in the boondocks outside of a major city trying to survive the hordes of Zombies.

Yes, this is actually more of a Remake of Survival of the Dead. Double joy.

This movie is full of family drama (read: they bicker), but very short on actual Zombie action. Translation...

It's boring as sin. Seriously, this sums up my experience watching this film quite well.

Here's a shot of some of the Zombie action. There was more of it in Pot Zombies, which I'm pretty sure was made for $40, a Malomar and a crate of Funyuns.

It's all super-serious and super-dull. I hope you care about these two, because, well, I won't SPOIL it. Sufficed to say, things aren't exactly upbeat.

Everything old is...better than this shit. I'd almost take the Broadstreet versions of Romero's flawed classic over this one- almost. Those ones still have pointless 3-D shots, confusing Meta plots and Sarah Lieving. I really do continue hold an irrational hate for this woman who's really done nothing to me. Speaking of problems, this movie has a lot of them. There's very little action, very little atmosphere and whole thing just looks cheap. Granted- it is cheap. Many films that were also made on the cheap- like Bad Taste- don't look cheap, so it's not something that is guaranteed with a budget this low. Hell, Butchered was better lit than this film- although it's use of spotlights at night presented different problems. This film was just dull, dull, dull. Seriously, I really was bored out of my mind here. Throw me a bone, movie! Don't be fooled by the interesting looking Box Art. Your $1 at a Redbox could be better spent on anything. If you're still not convinced, consider that *this* is their version of the 'Dead Rise' Radio Announcement...

Next up, I take a second try at a film that's basically Roger Corman Presents Monkey Shines. Break out the 'Roddy McDowall was gay' jokes!